Cure for Pain

“Get up, you slacker.” I said to my roommate early in the morning. “You’ve got shit to do.”  He stirred in his bed for a while, but never actually did anything. I found this the highlight of my morning; trying to get his lazy ass out of bed. “Seriously, you’ve got a job now! You have responsibilities.”

My roommate, Coleton, reluctantly rolled out of bed in a very anime-esque fashion. “Walker, why is it that whenever I sleep, you feel the urge to wake me up, but whenever you sleep, I have the common decency to not disturb you?”

“Because I pay the rent around here, smartass!” I said sarcastically. “I trust you to get ready and get out of here quickly. I’ve had to save both of us from the streets with a couple of extra shifts here and there, and if you actually helped with the bills, maybe I could be the lazy one with a change.”

He laughed. “So unnecessarily harsh, man!” I laughed too. It was fun having a roommate who shared your sense of humor. We were both dirt poor. I mean, straight out of college, NO ONE can make ends meet easily. Luckily, with the help of a good degree and a good college, I was offered a decently paying engineering job a couple of blocks from the apartment. Coleton had a job prior, but it didn’t pay jack shit, and he was never able to pay for much on his own. We decided to become roomates and pay for a decent apartment. It was large enough, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a room for our instruments. Having a decently popular local band was also a way to make ends meet, and we were getting some nice offers from local record producers.

Of course, his new job paid better, and I was depending on it to make ends meet around here. Even with my job and the band, this apartment’s rent was staggering. But he was responsible enough, so I left the apartment trusting him to do what he needed.

My first order of business was to meet my girlfriend at the local Starbucks. Tedious, but she kept me sane in this ever so messed up world we lived in, the least I could do is listen to her talk for an hour or two before my workday starts.

The job was simple enough, too. The boss was very lenient about due dates, and I was usually the first one in my “group” of engineers to get what he wanted done. 3D Modeling was easy; it was something you could do with the software on one screen and Reddit on the other.

After my job, I went to the local music store. It was one of those obscure treasures; hardly anyone ever went in there except for those who were in the know about the local music scene. Smooth jazz played constantly over the vintage stereo system, and the manager was always smiling; it was a cool joint. I picked up a couple of Beatles CDs, a Zeppelin bootleg Coleton wanted me to get for him, and Dan Auerbach’s solo project Keep it Hid and headed back home.

When I got home, Coleton wasn’t there. He didn’t sleep through his shift, I thought. That’s good. I popped Keep it Hid in my stereo and browsed 4chan until Coleton got home at around 5. I felt bad for him. He worked more hours than me, and hardly makes as much as I do. I perished the thought, though, and handed him the CD he wanted. He thanked me for it by giving me a friendly slap in the face.

“Come on, man. Let’s go to the bar.” He said. I really didn’t feel like getting out, but it was Friday, and with his new job, he could use some alcohol in his system just as much as I did. I eventually agreed, and we walked out the door.

Since we lived in the most densely populated section of Seattle, everything was very close to everything else; we didn’t even walk for ten minutes before we reached the familiar “18 and under prohibited” sign on the window. We met a couple of our other friends, Bryan and Hannah, in our signature booth. We were pretty well known around them for all of the concerts we did, and we were actually playing a gig there tomorrow. But that was the future, and we just wanted to have fun and get blitzed.

We sat down, said hey to our friends, and ordered a few beers to start of the night. “So hey,” said Bryan, breaking the silence. “Did you guys hear about this new local grunge band?” I knew what he was talking about. They came in last Tuesday night and tore the place up. They mostly played crappy Melvins and Toadies covers, but the energy coming from them was insane; they were a new level of crazy.

Our conversations usually went like this. It started off with a simple topic, then as we got drunk, our topics got more diverse. I remembered distinctly having an argument over the significance of Greek mythology with Coleton that almost resorted to fist-fighting; we had weird interests. Some really good blues band was playing Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan covers as our conversation turned to My Little Pony. It was no secret that we were bronies; hell, Bryan was wearing his “Doctor Hooves” shirt and making no attempt to hide it.

Hannah looked up from her third beer to bring up a unique topic. “You know those reality transporters my work uses?” Everyone nodded. Ever since someone proved the alternate reality theory a couple of years ago, scientists had worked towards communicating with these alternate realities, and a Dutch scientist finally manufactured and patented a transportation machine between these realities at the beginning of that year. Hannah’s job was to expand our reality’s knowledge to other less informed realities in exchange for money. It was a recently developed job; it had only been introduced when the transporters themselves were put up for sale at the beginning of that year.

“Yeah.” replied an obviously drunk Coleton. “What about them?” Hannah sunk in her seat. “Nothing really, I just thought it would make for a good conversation.” Coleton laughed. “Well, that wasn’t true, was it?” Coleton was usually a nice guy, but when he reached a certain level of drunkenness, he became more blunt and spoke his mind more.

The night went on, getting progressively weirder, and it was around two in the morning when Coleton and I got back to the apartment, both of us drunken messes. I popped Soundgarden's Superunknown into the CD player, and basically flopped onto my bed, falling asleep instantly.

I woke up around an hour later with a nasty hangover. My head was killing me, and no amount of Advil could help. I eventually decided to wait it out, and stay up for a while. I got up, and Coleton was, not surprisingly, still asleep. I decided  to watch TV, but there was nothing on but infomercials. I browsed the internet for a while until I had the sudden, but fierce, urge to pee. I ran to the bathroom and relieved myself.

“What’s that?” I heard a familiar female voice say. It sounded poppy and happy, and it sounded like it was coming from the door. I looked up at the door, but I didn’t see anything. I must be hearing things, I thought. Must be the hangover. I thought nothing of it and continued.

“I mean, seriously! It’s just hanging there!” There’s the voice again! I looked back at the door, but looked further down. around the frame of the door sat a small, weird silhouette. It looked to be around two feet tall. I reached over and turned the light on. Sitting right there, watching me urinate, was a pink, fluffy, jittery pony I knew only as Pinkie Pie.

My initial reaction was fear; not the truly weird “It’s a character from a fictional TV show!” type fear, but the “holy crap, she’s seeing the full package” type fear. She had caught me with my pants down, quite literally, and I pulled them up as fast as I could.

But no, that wasn’t it. From behind Pinkie came another familiar voice. “Pinkie, what did I tell you about keeping quie-“ said Twilight as she emerged from the room across from the bathroom, but she stopped abruptly at the sight of me. “I’m sorry sir! Please excuse us!”

The reality of the sight had yet to sink in. My aching head could only process the fact that there were two ponies in my bathroom, it couldn’t seem to process how weird it was. “It’s alright.” was all that he could seem to say. “So Twilight,” said Pinkie. “How do we get out of here?” The reality of the situation finally hit me like a gunshot, and I screamed as loud as I could. Twilight and Pinkie both jumped at the sound.

“What is it, sir?!” asked Twilight urgently. Could she seriously not see what was weird about two ponies from a fictional TV show standing in his bathroom?! I took a deep breath. Where to start? “Listen, I think you should sit down somewhere, this may take a bit of explanation from both parts.”